Security in Africa continues to be problematic to both scholars and practitioners. Its study often takes an itemised approach where actors are studied in detail and security outcomes are linked to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of actors. Perceived and actual security threats are correlated to conflict or presented as causal factors of conflict. In other words, security provision is explained through an itemised and reductionist analysis of security actors. In the past few decades, it is increasingly evident that non-linearity is pervasive in all forms of social organisation. This article rejects the Newtonian paradigm. It is argued that security is often a product of a system, which can be a complex adaptive system (CAS). It contends that a resilient security system guarantees a minimum level of security. To support this argument, empirical evidence from Cameroon is used to prove that Cameroon’s security system is a CAS. The conceptualisation of Cameroon’s security system as a CAS enables the application of both complexity science and resilience perspectives to security analysis. These perspectives allow the argument that Cameroon’s security system is resilient. The characterisation of Cameroon as fragile, failing or failed is rejected.

中文翻译：

---

作为复杂自适应系统的紧急属性的安全性

非洲的安全对学者和从业者来说仍然是个问题。它的研究通常采用逐项的方法，其中详细研究参与者，并将安全结果与参与者的有效性或无效性联系起来。感知的和实际的安全威胁与冲突相关或表现为冲突的因果因素。换句话说，安全提供是通过对安全参与者的逐项和简化分析来解释的。在过去的几十年里，越来越明显的是非线性在所有形式的社会组织中都普遍存在。本文拒绝牛顿范式。有人认为，安全通常是一个系统的产物，它可以是一个复杂的自适应系统 (CAS)。它争辩说，弹性安全系统可保证最低级别的安全性。为了支持这个论点，来自喀麦隆的经验证据被用来证明喀麦隆的安全系统是一个CAS。喀麦隆安全系统作为 CAS 的概念化能够将复杂性科学和弹性视角应用于安全分析。这些观点支持喀麦隆安全系统具有弹性的论点。拒绝将喀麦隆描述为脆弱、失败或失败的特征。